


a little vision of the sun and the air

by naimeria



Series: Nai'a [1]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Episode: s03e03 Coda, Episode: s03e03 Lana I Ka Moana (Adrift), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 03:59:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3275861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naimeria/pseuds/naimeria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He knows it had never been fair to blame the water, but it was an easy escape, an excuse. He’d grown past that as he aged, because he knew the fault was with him all along – should have known, should have controlled it. The blood in him is angry, an unsurprising revelation, because maybe the betrayal doesn’t belong to the water beneath him at all.</p><p>Or, that one fic where Danny is a mer(maid).</p>
            </blockquote>





	a little vision of the sun and the air

The story’s out in the air, Billy’s laughing face still white hot in his mind’s eye. It’s not as vivid as it used to be, that poignant sense of loss; maybe it’s the warmer waters or the sunny skies, that bright blue instead of chilled grey, but Danny hasn’t felt it this hard in a while. The ocean stayed a place of threat and betrayal after all the years, but now that he’s staring it in the face (survival, not fun), he has to swallow past the guilt all over again. Past the incompetence.

“Yeah, well.” The silence had grown a bit too long for his liking, and Steve is giving him that face, the one that flirts with pity but never quite gets there (and a voice reminds him that it never will, that if anyone is familiar with the difference between sympathy and pity, it's Steve McGarrett).

“I’m sure he was a good guy,” Steve says, voice pitched down to solemnness, and Danny wants to raise a hand, tell him to not go there, don’t do that now, please, but he’s motionless through the involuntary swaying of the water.

“The best,” he says.

The quiet is upon them again, making Danny feel shifty. He’s acutely aware of the slight sound of leaking air, of the choppy waves beneath, of Steve’s forehead dotted with sweat. “How’re the cramps?”

“I’ll be fine in a minute,” Steve replies. Danny’s look is one of incredulity, of which Steve responds with a scowl. It’s aneurysm face at its finest, really.

“Don’t believe me?”

“Not really, no. Look, I know you’ve got your Semper Fortis thing going on, but it’s beneficial to both of us if that giant shark doesn’t come back and finish what it started.”

“I won’t get eaten by the shark, Danno.” His tone is amused now, and Danny wants to shake him. He feels sick, feels fear, feels backed in a corner.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Steven,” he growls, but Steve misunderstands his frustration, the pressure building at the back of his brain, because the amusement leaks away to that weary impatience again.

“Look man, I get you’re freaked, but would it kill you to at least try to trust me?”

“I do trust you,” he amends immediately, because nothing else has ever been truer than that, “I just don’t trust the shark.” Or the ocean, he chokes on, because the betrayal had been much too deep. The scar is itched, a scab stretched over taut skin and pulled open yet again. Family doesn’t turn on family, except for when it does.

He knows it had never been fair to blame the water, but it was an easy escape, an excuse. He’d grown past that as he aged, because he knew the fault was with him all along – should have known, should have controlled it. The blood in him is angry, an unsurprising revelation, because maybe the betrayal doesn’t belong to the water beneath him at all.

Steve isn’t looking at him anymore, and perhaps that’s a good thing. Danny is a cacophony of doubt and conflict, decision already made but hindbrain unable to accept it. He’s scared, scared of the change, of how good it’ll feel, like a breath of air after holding it for so long. Scared of Steve, and what he’ll think.

“Alright,” Danny says, speaking mostly to himself, because this needs persuasion. Steve’s looking at him again, expecting another harsh comment no doubt, but Danny’s already shifting to the edge of the dingy before he can change his mind.

“What’re you doing, Danno?”

“My turn to paddle. You get to bale.”

“Whoa, you don’t have to, man. You can’t swim.”

“I can swim,” he snaps, too angry. “Survival, remember.”

“Not for fun, yeah, yeah,” Steve says, expression mostly unreadable. Of what he can read, he sees doubt, and Danny wants to scream. He says nothing, though, thoughts whirling too vividly. Maybe he can pull this off without Steve noticing? Will it even work? Does he want it to?

He’s on his feet before he can sit his ass back down and take it back, before he can laugh it off. The flimsy plastic wobbles beneath his feet, and he almost loses his balance. He doesn’t look Steve’s way, doesn’t know what he’ll do. Breathing deep and closing his eyes, he dives.

Danny’s hands break the surface, and it feels a bit like coming home.

The water rushes down his body, an intimate embrace, fingers lacing through his hair and raking along each inch of skin. It’s warm, too warm, and he shivers at how familiar and foreign it is. A laugh feels trapped in his chest and he lets it out in a stream of bubbles; he should be panicking, should be alarmed that his body hasn’t gotten with the program yet, because there’s no new skin, there’s no expanding lungs, there’s just him in the too-warm water, staring up at the sun breaking through the surface like molten glass.

It takes too long, long enough for his lungs to star burning, but his blood finally remembers. He’s shaking by the time it’s done – legs long gone, reworked and harder and stronger than ever, one instead of two. His skin is pearl soft, all muscle beneath taut skin, stripes trailing from flukes to peduncle and up hipbones.

Steve’s going to be panicking soon, he knows. He can’t breathe underwater, but he’d been able to hold his breath for almost ten minutes back in Jersey. He’s already feeling light-headed, and he knows it’s both from being out of practice and being in the wrong temperate.

He breaks the surface and takes a breath, tail beating the water beneath him in perfect time.

“Jesus, Danny, I thought something had happened,” Steve says from the dingy, floating harmlessly a few feet away. The waves are smooth, and the water is dark enough that Danny thinks maybe, just maybe. But Steve looks confused, and Danny doesn’t think he can do it.

He can’t lie anymore.

“Steve,” Danny says, and Steve faces goes pinched at the tone.

“What? Is there, uh,” and he’s looking around at the choppy waves.

“No shark, Steven. Toss me the rope, I forgot to grab it.”

“Danny, what’s up?”

“Nothing.”

“Liar.”

Panic grips for a moment, pure and unadulterated, and he sinks beneath the water, letting it wash in his mouth before returning it.

“Danny, what-”

A hard kick brings him to the edge of the dingy, and he’s grabbing Steve’s arm before he remembers what an awful idea this is. Steve goes bowling over the edge with a shout and a splash.

Their eyes meet beneath the surface, and his eyes look steely bright as he stares at Danny, first with indignation, then with shock. Everything’s muffled, time slowing to a stop as Steve looks down, and Danny remembers his childhood, all the loud nights and secrets screaming loud to be heard.

Steve is gaping at him, and keeps looking up and down, staring at his tail then shooting back up to Danny’s eyes, and Danny's never felt more insecure. They’re both motionless, little bubbles trickling out of Steve’s mouth every second that passes. He makes a noise and raises a hand, landing on Danny's shoulder and pushing, and that’s it, Danny reels back at the pressure, message loud and clear. Heart in his throat, he turns to flee, doesn’t know where, but quick as anything the hand is grappling back at his shoulder, and now Steve’s trying to talk, but you’re underwater, stupid, don’t do that.

Danny grabs him by the arm (probably harder than necessary) and pulls him up, both their mouths breaking the surface at the same time. They’re both yelling, Danny doesn’t even know what he’s saying, maybe its excuses or pleas for understanding, and they both stop at the same time, too, all wide eyes and hard breaths.

“I’m sorry,” Danny says first, because it’s hard to think of anything else to say when he’s given his partner the biggest surprise of their career. Steve, however, reacts a bit differently than Danny thinks he should; raises his brows and looks so incredulous it’s like Danny is speaking another language.

“You’re _sorry?_ Are you serious?”

“I was gonna tell you, I just didn’t know how-”

“No, no, _stop,_ Danny, you don’t get to apologize for that!”

“What the hell do you want me to say?!” Danny is yelling now, torn between wanting to hit him and never see him again, because this has gone more poorly than he’d ever guessed. He can see it now: losing his job, being ostracized from everyone he loves, kicked off the island, remaking his sad lonely life yet again. He’s so gripped by the vision of solidarity, shaking all over from it, that Steve apparently feels the need to grab his shoulder again, yanking Danny’s attention back to him.

“Dammit, Danny, I want you to not be sorry for this!”

Danny’s mouth is hanging open, but no sound comes out, and Steve seems to take that as an invitation to keep going. “You don’t get to apologize for what you are.”

In a rare moment in his life, Danny remains speechless.

“I’m not gonna say I’m not hurt, that you hid this for so long – were you ever gonna tell me?”  

Danny finds his voice then. “I was, I just – it’s not exactly an easy conversation, Steve!”

“You told Rachel?”

“Did I tell – of course I told Rachel! When she made it obvious she wanted to carry my kid, I had to make sure she knew what she was getting into, what our daughter could be.”

“Is Grace – “

“She’s half, yes.” He feels too raw for this, tail flicking in the water lazily beneath them both. He accidentally grazes Steve’s shin and jerks like he’s been burned. Steve looks pained.

“Please don’t,” he says.

“Don’t what?”

“Do that. Act like I’m going to hit you. I’m not-” he stops, huffing out a breath, hand raking over his wet face and pushing his hair up in all directions. “Had a guy on my team. Can't give you a name, but the guy came from outside of British Columbia. A natural in the water. Figured out why pretty quick after being in the water with him,” Steve says. Danny’s hooked on every syllable, because he thinks he knows where this is going. “Turns out, he’d had a different nickname back home. Blackberry, after a resident orca off their coast.”

Steve’s giving him a pointed look, looking a bit uncomfortable, unwilling to fill in the blanks. _It’s classified, Danny, but please, understand me,_ his face is saying, and Danny feels like he’s been shoved in front of a moving truck.

“Are you serious right now?” He needs to know.

“Do you really think I’d joke about this, Danny?” He’s almost yelling, eyes wide. “God, Danny – yes, I’m serious. He never talked about it, but we all knew, we adjusted, we took it in stride because it’s what we were trained to do. This? It’s not an end-all. I’m not-” He blows out a hard breath, then plants his hands on Danny’s shoulders. “This isn’t gonna push me away, Danny. I’m still here.”

“I, uh,” Danny manages to spit out, because he’s still shaking all over, and he’s not lying, he really is still here, still touching him. “Pacific white-sided dolphin,” is what he says next, because he can’t think of anything besides _thank god._

“What?” Steve jerks from the unexpected response, eyebrows bunching.

“Is what my subspecies is,” Danny clarifies, then lifts his grey flukes out of the water. Steve is looking at him with an guarded expression, hand held aloft as if to touch. Danny clears his throat and nods, and Steve's expression softens. Danny lets the rough pads of his fingers ghost over the ragged edges of his worn flukes, shivering all over again.

“How could you deny yourself something like this, Danno,” Steve murmurs, staring at the firm skin beneath his fingers. Danny floats a little higher, so some of his peduncle and lateral stripes are visible. “This is what – _who_ you are.” He sounds like he’s the one that’s been denying his blood all this time, as if he’s the one that’s been ignoring the oceans silent summons for years and years. Danny makes a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat.

“Water’s warm here. Wasn’t hard.”

It’s another lie, and it sounds like one, too. Judging by Steve’s pursed lips, he doesn’t believe a word of it either.

“Didn’t know if I could face it again,” Danny amends, because the words need to be said. He'd decided the lying was going to stop; he’s made the biggest step, everything else should come naturally now. Steve cants his head in a nod and looks down, eyes grey in the blue of the ocean.

“Well, it’s a good look on you, man,” Steve says, as if it’s the simplest thing in the world. Danny can’t stop looking at him, at the look he’s being given.

Steve’s staring at his flukes with reverence, Danny realizes, as if he’s never seen anything more beautiful.

Danny makes some kind of pathetic noise in the back of his throat before rushing into Steve’s personal space with a loud splash. They sink under the water and Steve’s mouth is a stream of bubbles in his surprise, so Danny cuts it off by kissing him.

It’s a rather chaste thing, mostly to make sure Steve has enough air (that’s what he tells himself, anyway), but when Steve’s hand immediately comes up to lace fingers through the back of his hair, he thinks this isn’t such a bad idea. Sure, it’s fulfilling an age old fantasy of his, but it’s also an even stronger reassurance, proof that Steve wasn’t lying, is really planning to stick around.

He sighs into Steve’s pliant mouth, finally feeling at peace.

**Author's Note:**

> A pacific white-sided dolphin (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens) is a dolphin native to the cool waters of the Northern Pacific Ocean. 
> 
> In my headverse, mermaids are very rarely fish (and they don't resemble humans enough to ever visit the surface) due to the physiology of humans. Porpoises, dolphins and whales, being mammals, make up most of the merpeople. Also, for the sake of this fic, we're pretending the surfing lessons in the show never happened. Danno really don't surf.
> 
> And yes, there is an orca off of the coast of the British Columbia named Blackberry (J27). He's part of the critically endangered Southern Resident pod, their endangerment caused by over-fishing. Save a killer whale, don't eat farmed salmon.


End file.
